Twelve TV channels were successful bidders for limited MPEG4 slots on Indian pubcaster Doordarshan’s FTA DTH platform, FreeDish, with eight of them being news channels.

Though Prasar Bharati, DD’s parent, didn’t disclose the total number of bidders, industry sources said there were quite a few of them vying for limited place on the platform and the news channels, big and small, fought gamely to outbid the other.

The successful news channels included India News UP/UK, News 18 UP/UK, News 24 Think First, News India 24×7, News State UP/UK, Raftar, Samay, Sudarshan News and Swadesh News.

As and when the formalities are completed the TV channels will board the FreeDish gravy train from April 1 and will have a year’s time till March 31, 2023 when the slots would be put up for auction again.

Apart from more TV channels, the highest bidding price and the average revenue per slot for this round of auction have also gone up in comparison to last year, the government said Friday.

According to data made available by Prasar Bharati, the average bid/revenue per slot has gone up from Rs. 0.89 crore last year to Rs. 1.27 crore this year, registering a rise of 43 percent. The highest bid price went up by 42.85 percent from Rs. 1.12 crore last year to Rs. 1.6 crore this year.

Prasar Bharati had invited applications for allotment of MPEG-4 slots on FreeDish in January for the period of April 2022 to March 2023.

Bidding for the MPEG-4 slots, open to all genre (language) TV channels, carried a reserve price of Rs. 50,000,00 (Rs. 50 lakh) per annum.

The clamour for FreeDish slots is because of the platform’s wide reach, including in far-flung and rural areas. Though there is no official data on it, industry estimates put the subscriber base of the DTH service at about 40 million— more than the combined subscriber number of the four private sector paid DTH platforms.

International public broadcasters, licensed by the MIB, were also eligible to bid for a place.

Meanwhile, on February 1, while announcing the country’s Budget proposals, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said the federal government will provide additional funding to pubcaster Doordarshan to expand and strengthen its DTH service in the villages located near the country’s borders under a scheme aimed at upping infrastructure and communications projects in sensitive areas bordering China and Pakistan.

The PM Modi government’s initiatives aimed at beefing up infrastructure in border areas in the northern part of India has been named Vibrant Village Programme.

“The activities will include construction of village infrastructure, housing, tourist centres, road connectivity, provisioning of decentralized renewable energy, direct to home access for Doordarshan and educational channels, and support for livelihood generation,” Sitharaman had said.

However, according to a PTI report, the government had announced an outlay of Rs 3,980.77 crore for the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) in the 2022-23 fiscal — a decrease of Rs 90 crore from last year.

The allocation to the autonomous national broadcaster body Prasar Bharati — parent of Doordarshan and All India Radio — has been also reduced to Rs 2,555.29 crore from Rs 2,640.11 crore allotted to it in the last fiscal.